William Shatner has named his most difficult job in his 70-year acting career.
He said one of the most difficult shoots of his life was on the 1977 film Kingdom Of The Spiders because he had to be covered in real tarantulas.
The 93-year-old Hollywood legend played veterinarian Dr. Robert ‘Rack’ Hansen in the sci-fi horror film set in rural Verde Valley, Arizona, overrun by killer tarantulas.
Shatner’s co-stars Woody Strode and Tiffany Bolling played local farmer Walter Colby and archaeologist Diane Ashley, respectively.
Walter is scared when his farm animals are killed by an unknown creature and after he and Hansen send a sample to an arachnologist at the university lab, Dr. Hansen arrives to inform Walter that his animals were killed by poison poison. spider, to everyone’s amazement.
William Shatner has named his most difficult job in his 70-year acting career. Seen in 2017
Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in the STAR TREK episode, A Piece of the Action in 1968.
The discovery of the killer spiders has fatal consequences for the town.
To film the scenes with the tarantulas, director John ‘Bud’ Cardos did not use prop spiders and instead arranged to purchase 5,000 live tarantulas for filming, spending almost 10 percent of the $500,000 budget on arachnids.
Shatner has recalled that working with the tarantulas was as horrible as the scenes seen on screen because the eight-legged beasts shed their stinging hairs, leaving him and his co-stars itchy all over.
In an appearance in The Drew Lane ShowShatner said: ‘The thing about Kingdom of the Spiders is that the spiders, they were tarantulas, they were real! They did not have small fins.
‘Every now and then, on screen, they would throw a big bag of tarantulas at my head.
And not only do they have sharp little claws that allow them to climb everything, but the hairs on their bodies are used as stinging powder. So the debris they threw on my head was ugly.”
He said one of the most difficult shoots was on the 1977 film Spider Kingdom because it had to be covered in real tarantulas.
The star at the Comic-Con Fan Expo at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in August
With wife Elizabeth Shatner at the premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s KOOZA on the Santa Monica Pier on October 24
Other problems with the tarantulas on set included them refusing to run towards their “victims” due to being nervous around humans.
And since these are cannibalistic species, each of the 5,000 spiders needed their own individual container.
Shatner, famous worldwide for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the original 1960s Star Trek television series and later films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, previously revealed that he was also bitten by his creepy disgusting co-stars.
Talking about the Spider Kingdom for a Shout! Factory TV Original said, “You’re programmed to be afraid of creepy crawlies.”
“Once I learned that the bite is painful, but it is more like a bee sting, a tarantula bite is not that bad.”